Rising health care costs cause headaches, desperation

By KYLE ALSPACH
GateHouse News Service

Keith Lapides, who owns a trucking company, says he spends $1,400 a month to keep his family insured. Jeff Loughlin photo

Keith Lapides has two words to describe the rising cost of health insurance: It stinks.

Lapides, 51, runs his own trucking company and has to pay the full price of the insurance himself - a cost he says has doubled in the past decade.

The current cost to insure his family of four: $1,400 per month.

“Insurance gets paid first,” said Lapides, who lives in Easton and owns Easton-based E & K Trucking. “You cut out your luxuries to make sure it gets paid.”

Experts say the soaring cost of health care is straining people’s finances like never before. And while we talk about health care costs, for most people that translates into how much comes out of our pay checks each week for health insurance.

In Massachusetts, the average employee contribution for a family health plan is 77 percent higher than in 2001 - even though inflation has grown just 20 percent in that time. The average monthly insurance cost jumped from $172 to $305 per month during that period for a family, according to the state Division of Healthcare Finance and Policy.

“It’s crazy,” said Carol Schneider of Bridgewater, a nurse at Boston Medical Center.

“But I consider myself lucky, compared to what I see other people paying,” said Schneider, who is 46 and pays $450 per month to insure her family of four.

Employees on individual insurance plans have been hit even harder. Their average contribution has nearly tripled since 2001, from $40 to $114 per month.

There are many reasons for the spike, experts say.

The huge expansion in new health care technologies hasn’t been cheap, said Craig Higgins, chair of the health care administration department at Stonehill College in Easton.

“Commercial hospitals and teaching hospitals are always going to want the best technology, because it means better quality care,” Higgins said. “But it’s expensive.”

Another major factor has been the pharmaceutical industry and its direct-to-consumer advertising campaigns, said Mitchell Glavin, an assistant professor of health care administration at Stonehill.

“People have gone into their physicians’ offices asking for more prescriptions, so that became a big expenditure,” Glavin said.

Americans now spend $2.4 trillion a year on health care in all its shapes and forms. Experts say the rapid growth of health care spending is going to continue to years to come as aging baby boomers require more health services.

Which means there will be a growing number of people like Tammy Webster of Raynham, who wonder if there’s a cure for those struggling with high health care costs.

“It’s crazy that people are living for health insurance. They have to work to pay for their health insurance,” said Webster, 42, a self-employed personal trainer.

For some, the cost of health care is more than they can pay.

A 51-year-old Brockton woman, who did not want to be named due to embarrassment about her situation, said she is receiving publicly-subsidized insurance because she couldn’t afford to get insurance through her employer.

The woman said she has fallen on hard times in recent years after losing a well-paying bookkeeping job and being treated for breast cancer.

Public insurance, she said, is her only choice right now due to the high cost of a plan through her current job.

“I’d like to get off” the public assistance, she said. “But I just can’t afford it.”

Tips

• Compare health plans - costs can vary widely, so examine each one closely to find the best deal.
• Cheapest premium health care plan doesn’t mean the cheapest plan-- You’ll save money by getting a plan that includes the benefits you will most likely use.
• Don’t be picky about flexibility in a health care plan - if you want low out-of-pocket costs, stick with a plan that requires using one particular network of providers.